V. I. Lenin

Two Years of Soviet Rule

Speech at a Joint Session of the All-Russia
Central Executive Committee, the Moscow
Soviet of Workers’ and Red army
Deputies, the All-Russia Central Council of
trade Unions, and Factory Committees, On the
Occasion of the Second anniversary of the
October Revolution. November 7, 1919

Comrades, two years ago, when the imperialist war was
still raging, it seemed to all the supporters of the bourgeoisie in Russia,
to the masses of the people and, I dare say, to most of the workers in other
countries, that the uprising of the Russian proletariat and their conquest
of political power was a bold but hopeless enterprise. At that time world
imperialism appeared such a tremendous and invincible force that it seemed
stupid of the workers of a backward country to attempt to revolt against it.
Now, however, as we glance back over the past two years, we see that even
our opponents are increasingly admitting that we were right. We see that
imperialism, which seemed such an insuperable colossus, has proved before
the whole world to be a colossus with feet of clay, and the two years
through which we have passed and during which we have had to fight, mark
with ever-growing clarity the victory not only of the Russian, but also of
the international proletariat.

Comrades, during the first year of the existence of Soviet power we had to
experience the might of German imperialism, to suffer the coercive and
predatory peace that was forced on us; we were alone in issuing our call to
revolution, and met with no support or response. The first year of our
rule was also the first year of our struggle against imperialism, and we
soon became convinced that the struggle of the different parts of this
gigantic international imperialism was nothing but its death throes, and
that both German imperialism and the imperialism of the Anglo-French
bourgeoisie had an interest in this struggle. During that year we
established that this struggle only strengthened, only increased and
restored our forces and enabled us to direct them against imperialism as a
whole. We created such a situation during the first year but, during the
whole of the second year, we stood face to face with our enemy. There were
pessimists who even last year severely attacked us; even last year they said
that Britain, France and America were such a huge, such a colossal force
that they would crush our country. The year has passed, and as you see,
while the first year may be called that of the might of international
imperialism, the second year will be called that of the onslaught of
Anglo-American imperialism and of victory over that onslaught, of victory
over Koichak and Yudenicb, and the beginning of victory over Denikin.

Now we know perfectly well that all the military forces sent against us have
been directed from a definite source. We know that the imperialists have
given them all the military supplies, all the arms needed; we know that they
have handed over their global navies in part to our enemies, and now are
doing all they can to help and build up forces both in the South of Russia
and in Archangel. But we know perfectly well that all these seemingly huge
and invincible forces of international imperialism are unreliable, and hold
no terrors for us, that at the core they are rotten, that they are making us
stronger and stronger, and that this added strength will enable us to win
victory on the external front and to make it a thorough-going one. I shall
not dwell on this point as it will be dealt with by Comrade Trotsky.

It seems to me that we must now try to draw general lessons from the two
years of heroic constructive work.

What, in my opinion, is the most important conclusion to be drawn from the
two years of developing the Soviet Republic, what, in my view, is most
important for us, is .the lesson we have had in organising working-class
power. It seems to me that in this we must not confine ourselves to the
various concrete facts that concern the work of some commissariat and which
most of you know of from your own experience. It seems to me that, in
glancing back over what we have gone through, we must draw a general lesson
from this work of construction, a lesson that we shall learn and carry
further afield among working people. The lesson is that only workers'
participation in the general administration of the state has enabled us to
hold out amidst such incredible difficulties, and that only by following
this path shall we achieve complete victory. Another lesson to be drawn is
that we must maintain the right attitude to the peasantry, to the many
millions of peasants, for that attitude alone has made it possible for us to
carry on successfully amid all our difficulties, and it alone shows us the
path along which we are achieving one success after another.

If you recall the past, if you recall the first steps of Soviet power, if
you recall the entire work of developing all branches of the administration
of the Republic, not excluding the military branch, you will see that the
establishment of working-class rule two years ago, in October, was only the
beginning. Actually, at that time, the machinery of state power was not yet
in our hands, and if you glance back over the two years that have since
elapsed you will agree with me that in each sphere-military, political and
economic-we have had to win every position inch by inch, in order to
establish real machinery of state power, sweeping aside those who before us
had been at the head of the industrial workers and working people in
general.

It is particularly important for us to understand the development that has
taken place in this period, because there is development along the same
lines all over the world. The industrial workers and other working people do
not take their first steps with their real leaders; the proletariat
themselves are now taking over the administration of state, political power,
and at their head we see everywhere leaders who are destroying the old
prejudices of petty-bourgeois democracy, old prejudices the vehicles of
which in our country are the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, and
throughout Europe are the representatives
of bourgeois governments. Previously this was an exception, now
it has become the general rule. Two years ago, in October, the
bourgeois government in Russia—their alliance or coalition
with the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries—was
smashed, but we know how, in carrying on our work, we had
subsequently to reorganise every branch of administration in
such a way that genuine representatives, revolutionary workers,
the vanguard of the proletariat, really took in hand the
organisation of state power. That was in October, two years ago,
when the work went on at terrific pressure; nevertheless we
know, and we must say it, that this work is not finished even
now. We know how those who formerly ran the state resisted us,
how officials at first tried refusing to administrate, but this
gross sabotage was stopped in a few weeks by the proletarian
government. It showed that not the slightest impression could be
made on it by such refusal; and after we had put an end to this
gross sabotage this same enemy tried other methods.

Time and again it has happened that supporters of the
bourgeoisie have been found even at the head of workers’
organisations; we had to get down to the business of making the
fullest use of the workers’ strength. Take, for example,
what we experienced when the railway administration, the railway
proletariat were headed by people who led them along the
bourgeois, and not the proletarian path.46 We know that in all
spheres wherever we could get rid of the bourgeoisie, we did so,
but at what a price! In each sphere we gained ground inch by inch,
and promoted the best of our workers, those who had gone through
the hard school of organising the administration. Viewed from the
side, all this is, perhaps, not very difficult, but actually, if
you go into the matter, you will see with what difficulty the
workers, who had been through all the stages of the struggle,
asserted their rights, how they set things going—from
workers’ control to workers’ management of industry,
or how on the railways, beginning from the notorious Vikzhel,[Vikzhel—All-Russia Executive Committee of the
Railwaymen’s Trade Union.—Editor] they
got an efficient organisation working; you will see how
representatives of the working class are gradually making their
way into all our organisations and strengthening them by their
activity. Take the co-operatives, for example, where we see huge
numbers of workers’ representatives. We know that formerly
they consisted almost entirely of non-working-class
people. Furthermore, in the old co-operatives, there were people
steeped in the views and interests of the old bourgeois
society. In this respect the workers had to wage a long struggle
before they could take power into their own hands and subordinate
the co-operatives to their interests, before they could carry on
more fruitful work.

But our most important work has been the reorganisation of the
old machinery of state, and although this has been a difficult
job, over the last two years we have seen the results of the
efforts of the working class and we can say that in this sphere we
have thousands of working-class representatives who have been all
through the fire of the struggle, forcing out the representatives
of bourgeois rule step by step. We see workers not only in state
bodies; we see them in the food supply services, in the sphere
that was controlled almost exclusively by representatives of the
old bourgeois government, of the old bourgeois state. The workers
have created a food supply apparatus, and although a year ago we
could not yet fully cope with the work, although a year ago
workers made up only 30 per cent of it, we now have as many as 80
per cent workers in the food supply organisations. These simple
and striking figures express the step taken by our country, and
for us the important thing is that we have achieved great results
in organising proletarian power after the political
revolution.

Furthermore, the workers have done and are continuing to do the
important job of producing proletarian leaders. Tens and hundreds
of thousands of valiant workers are emerging from our midst and
are going into battle against the whiteguard generals. Step by
step we are gaining power from our enemy; formerly workers were
not very skilful in this field, but we are now gradually winning
area after area from our enemy, and there are no difficulties that
can stop the proletariat. The proletariat is gaining in every
sphere, gradually, one after another, despite all difficulties,
and is attracting representatives of the proletarian masses so
that in every branch of administration, in every little unit, from
top to bottom, representatives of the proletariat themselves go
through the school of administration, and then train tens and
hundreds of thousands of people capable of independently
conducting all the affairs of state administration, of building
the state by their own efforts.

Comrades! Lately we have witnessed a particularly brilliant
example of success in our work. We know how widespread subbotniks
have become among class-conscious workers. We know those
representatives of communism who most of all have suffered the
torments of famine and bitter cold, but whose contribution in the
rear is no smaller than that of the Red Army at the front; we know
how, at the critical moment when the enemy was advancing on
Petrograd, and Denikin took Orel, when the bourgeoisie were in
high spirits and resorted to their last and favourite weapon, the
spreading of panic, we announced a Party Week. At that moment the
worker Communists went to the industrial workers and other working
people, to those who most of all had endured the burden of the
imperialist war and were starving and freezing, to those on whom
the bourgeois panic-mongers counted most of all, to those who bore
most of the burden on their backs; it was to them that we
addressed ourselves during the Party Week and said: "You are
scared by the burdens of working-class rule, by the threats of the
imperialists and capitalists; you see our work and our
difficulties; we appeal to you, and we open wide the doors of our
Party only to you, only to the representatives of the working
people. At this difficult moment we count on you and call you into
our ranks there to undertake the whole burden of building the
state." You know that it was a terribly difficult moment, both
materially and because of the enemy’s successes in foreign
policy and in the military sphere. And you know what unparalleled,
unexpected and unbelievable success marked the end of this Party
Week in Moscow alone, where we got over 14 thousand new Party
members. There you have the result of the Party Week that is
totally transforming, that is remaking the working class, and by
the experience of work is turning those who were the passive,
inert instruments of the bourgeois
government, the exploiters, and the bourgeois state into real
creators of the future communist society. We know that we have a
reserve of tens and hundreds of thousands of working-class and
peasant youths, those who saw and know to the full the old
oppression of landowner and bourgeois society, who have seen the
unparalleled difficulties of our constructive work, who saw what
heroes the first contingent of Party functionaries proved to be in
1917 and 1918, who have been coming to us in bigger numbers and
whose devotion is the greater the severer our difficulties. These
reserves give us confidence that in these two years we have
achieved a firm and sound cohesion and now possess a source from
which we shall for a long time be able to draw still more
extensively, and so ensure that the working people themselves
undertake to develop the state. In this respect we have had such
experience during these two years in applying working-class
administration in all spheres, that we can say boldly and without
any exaggeration that now all that remains is to continue what has
been begun, and things will proceed as they have done these two
years, but at an ever faster pace.

In another sphere, that of the relation of the working class to
the peasantry, we have had far greater difficulties. Two years
ago, in 1917, when power passed to the Soviets, the relation was
still totally unclear. The peasantry as a whole had already turned
against the landowners, and supported the working class, because
it saw they were fulfilling the wishes o the peasant masses, that
they were real working-class fighters, and not those who, in
league with the landowners, had betrayed the peasantry. But we
know perfectly well that a struggle was only just beginning within
the peasantry. In the first year the urban proletariat still had
no firm foothold in the countryside. This is to be seen with
particular clarity in those border regions where the rule of the
whiteguards was for a time consolidated. We saw it, last summer,
in 1918, when they won easy victories in the Urals. We saw that
proletarian rule was not yet established in the countryside
itself, and that it was not enough to introduce it from
outside. What was needed was that the peasantry should, by their
own experience, by their own organisational work, arrive at the
same conclusions, and although this work is immeasurably more
difficult, slower and harder, it is incomparably more fruitful so
far as results go. This is our main achievement of the second year
of Soviet rule.

I shall not speak of the military significance of our victory
over Kolchak, but I shall say that had the peasantry not undergone
the experience of comparing the rule of the bourgeois dictators
with that of the Bolsheviks, that victory would not have been
won. Yet the dictators began with a coalition, with a Constituent
Assembly; in that government apparatus there participated the same
Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks whom we meet at every
step in our work as the people of yesterday, as the people who
built co-operatives, trade unions, teachers’ organisations
and a host of other organisations which we have to
reorganise. Kolchak began in alliance with them, with individuals
for whom the Kerensky experiment was not enough—they
undertook a second. They did so in order to get the border
regions, those farthest from the centre, to rise against the
Bolsheviks. We could not give the peasants in Siberia what the
revolution gave them in the rest of Russia. In Siberia the
peasants did not get landed estates, because there were none of
them there, and that was why it was easier for them to put faith
in the white-guards. All the forces of the Entente and the
imperialist army which had suffered least of all in the war,
i. e., the Japanese army, were drawn into the struggle. We know
that hundreds of millions of rubles were expended on assisting
Kolchak, that all means were employed to support him. Was there
anything he lacked on his side? He had everything. Everything
possessed by the strongest powers in the world, as well as a
peasantry and a huge territory almost devoid of an industrial
proletariat. What caused the destruction of all this? The fact
that the experience of the workers, soldiers and peasants showed
once again that the Bolsheviks were right in their forecasts, in
their appraisal of the relation of social forces, when they said
that the alliance of the workers and peasants is effected with
difficulty, but that at any rate it is the only invincible
alliance against the capitalists.

This is science, comrades, if one may use that term here. This
experience is one of the greatest difficulty, one that takes
account of everything and consolidates everything—it is the
experience of communism; we can only establish communism if the
peasantry arrive consciously at a definite conclusion. We can do
this only when we enter into alliance with the peasants. We were
able to convince ourselves of this by the Koichak experience. The
Kolchak revolt was an experience of great bloodshed, but that was
no fault of ours.

You are now perfectly familiar with the second trouble that
afflicts us; you know that famine and cold have affected our
country more severely than any other. You know that the blame for
this is thrown on communism, but you also know perfectly well that
communism has nothing to do with it. In all countries we see
increasing and growing famine and cold and soon everybody will be
convinced that this situation in Russia is not the consequence of
communism, but of four years of worldwide war. It is the war that
has caused all the horror we are enduring, that has caused this
famine and cold. But we believe that we shall soon emerge from
this state of affairs. The whole problem is only that the workers
must work, but work for themselves and not for those who for four
years have been engaged in throat-cutting. As for the fight
against famine and cold, it is going on everywhere. The most
powerful states are now subject to this affliction.

We have had to resort to state requisitioning to collect grain
from the many millions of our peasantry, and have done so not the
way it was done by the capitalists, who operated along with the
profiteers. In settling this problem we went with the workers, we
went against the profiteers. We used the method of persuasion, we
went to the peasantry and told them that all we were doing was in
support of them and the workers. The peasant who has a grain
surplus and delivers it to us at a fixed price, is our ally. The
one, however, who does not do so is our enemy, is a criminal, is
an exploiter and profiteer, and we can have nothing in common with
him. We went with a message to the peasant, and this message has
increasingly drawn the peasantry to our side. We have got quite
definite results in this field. Between August and October of last
year we procured 37 million poods of grain, but this year we have
procured 45 million poods, and that without undertaking a special
and careful check. An improvement, as you see, is taking place, a
slow but undoubted one. And even if we reckon with the gaps made
by Denikin’s occupation of our fertile region, there are
nevertheless signs of our being able to carry through our plan of
procurement and plan of distribution at state prices. In this
respect, too, our machinery has in a sense become established, and
we are now taking the socialist path.

Now we are faced with the problem of a fuel crisis. The grain
problem is no longer so acute; the position is that we have grain,
but have no fuel. We have been deprived of our coalfield by
Denikin. The loss of this coalfield has brought us unprecedented
difficulties, and in this case we are doing just what we did in
relation to grain. As we did previously we are again addressing
ourselves to the workers. In the same way as we reorganised our
food supply machinery; which, after being strengthened and set
going, fulfilled quite a definite job that has yielded splendid
results, so we are now improving our fuel supply machinery day by
day. We are telling the workers from what direction this or that
danger is advancing on us, in which direction and from what region
we must send new forces, and we are confident that, just as we
conquered our grain difficulties last year, so now we shall
conquer our fuel difficulties.

Allow me for the moment to confine myself to this summary of
our work. In conclusion, I shall take the liberty of saying just a
few words about how our international situation is improving. We
have examined the path we have followed, and the results show that
our path has been the right and proper one. When we took power in
1917, we were alone. In 1917 it was said in all countries that
Bolshevism could not take root. Now there is a powerful communist
movement in those same countries. In the second year after we
conquered power, six months after we founded the Third
International, the Communist International, this International has
in fact become the main force in the labour movement of all
countries. In this respect the experience we have undergone has
yielded the most splendid, unparalleled and rapid results, True,
the movement to freedom in Europe is not proceeding in the same
way as in our country. But if you recall our two years of
struggle, you will see that in the Ukraine too, and even in some
parts of Russia proper, where the population was of a specific
composition—for instance, in the Cossack and Siberian areas,
or in the Urals—the movement to victory was not so rapid and
did not follow the same road as in Petrograd and in Moscow, in the
heart of Russia. Of course, we cannot be surprised at the slower
pace of the movement in Europe, where pressure of jingoism and
imperialism that has to be surmounted is greater; nonetheless the
movement is proceeding unswervingly, along the very road being
indicated by the Bolsheviks. Everywhere we are witnessing this
forward movement. The mouthpieces of the Mensheviks and
Socialist-Revolutionaries are yielding place everywhere to
representatives of the Third International. The old leaders are
falling, and the communist movement has risen everywhere, and that
is why, after two years of Soviet rule, we can say, supported by
the facts, we have every right to say, that not only on the scale
of the Russian state, but also on an international scale we now
have the following of all the politically conscious, all that are
revolutionary among the masses, in the revolutionary world. And we
can say that after what we have endured no difficulties hold any
terrors for us, that we shall withstand all these difficulties,
and then conquer them all. (Stormy applause.)